AUTOMOTIVE

SGI high-performance computing systems leverage the world's most advanced shared-memory architecture, enabling technical and scientific customers to address complex problems and to compute vast amounts of data faster and in a more coherent manner than on conventional distributed-memory systems. To meet the Skoda technical computing department's ever-growing computer technology needs, SGI has provided an open and flexible solution that includes an SGI(R) Altix(R) 3000 supercluster powered by 96 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors and 192GB memory. The Prague-based car maker's installation also includes a 16TB storage system, SGI(R) InfiniteStorage TP9300 Fibre Channel RAID array, integrated into a storage area network environment enabling powerful access for all other computing servers and pre- and post-processing workstations. The Altix(R) supercluster will be used mainly for car crash analysis with PAM-CRASH(R) from ESI Group and fluid dynamics analysis with FLUENT(R) from Fluent Inc. This new system will provide Skoda Auto with additional processing power of close to 500 GFLOPS and allow engineers to reduce processing times, thereby optimizing decisions concerning car development and design efficiency, quality and safety. The SGI Altix family already has been adopted by many major research and industry organizations around the world. The Altix system combines three powerful technologies -- the most advanced Intel(R) processor family, a 64-bit open-source Linux(R) operating environment and the SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture -- creating a solution that enables supercomputing-class performance and helps solve the most challenging problems of the 21st century. Since its launch last year, the family of Intel Itanium 2 processor-based SGI Altix 3000 systems has consistently shattered scalability and performance records on high-performance computing industry-standard benchmarks. "Skoda Auto has decided to use Linux based computing systems in car design. This confirms the readiness of such a solution for the mission-critical areas and applications of industrial enterprises," said Michal Klimes, managing director for Central and Eastern Europe, SGI. "The usage of such systems built upon standards improve significantly the return of our customers' technology investments and extend the lifecycle of rapidly evolving technology."